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A new glow in boomtown

Along the Cartagena waterfront, architects Jos Selgas and Luca Cano light up an
architectural antidote to the gloom of the Spanish real estate crisis.

Architecture / Mario Ballesteros

Author
Mario Ballesteros

Sections
Architecture

Photography
Iwan Baan

Keywords
DOMUS 954, Jos Selgas, Luca Cano,
selgascano

Published
10 January 2012

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Location
Cartagena

Murcia, a region in Southern Spain on the Mediterranean coast, is

a paradigm of the rise and collapse of ladrillo (Spanish for brick,
but also a popular way of referring to the country's construction
boom that went bust). More ladrillo, more crisis, people say now.

Murcia had plenty of it: hundreds of public or private

development schemes and hundreds of thousands of new
housing projects made Murcia Spain's fastest-growing region in
the early 2000s. Today all that has changed: residential
construction dropped a whopping 82 per cent between 2008 and
2009, and Murcia now struggles with soaring unemployment and
social unrest, water shortages and exposed cases of blatant
corruption, scores of empty apartments, abandoned
developments and roads leading to nowhere.
Ladrillo has certainly left its imprint on Murcia. Everywhere you
turn, there's brick. The narrow streets of its towns are clogged
with anonymous apartment and office buildings, cheap brick
facades in hues that range from brownish to puke-orange. Even
the expansive openness of Murcia's arid terrain offers little to rest
the eyes on apart from terracotta drab, only sporadically
interrupted by white outlet malls, gleaming plastic tarps of
factory farms, or rare green patches of grape vines, olive trees
and orange groves.
Spain's real-estate debacle and Murcia's brand of ladrillo-driven
development are only part of the backdrop for the latest project of
Madrid-based architects selgascano: an 18,500-square-metre
seaside auditorium and conference hall in the port city of
Cartagena, Murcia. Almost a decade passed from when the
architects won the commission until the building opened to the
public in late 2011, after facing numerous budgetary,
construction and political hurdles. The protracted construction
period certainly might have had its drawbacks, but it also
provided a rare occasion for the architects to stick to their usual
gutsiness and painstaking attention to detail, regardless of the
scale and the demands of the project.

Sitting stark and unassuming at the end of the kilometre-long Paseo Alfonso XII seafront boulevard, the building blends into the burly scenery of the
old shipping port.

Cartagenawhich is Murcia's second largest cityis

visually and physically less oppressive than other parts of the
province. Blessed with the typical breeziness of Mediterranean
towns and the mishmash of stimuli one finds in any port city,
Cartagena is dotted with remnants of its Carthaginian and Roman
pasts, oceanic paraphernalia (including the hull-turnedmonument of the first ever electric submarine, built in Spain in
the late 1880s), the bulk of defensive and industrial naval
infrastructures, the imposing ancient city walls and massive
rusty figs. Selgascano obviously took many of their cues from this
unique urban setting. Sitting stark and unassuming at the end of
the kilometre-long Paseo Alfonso XII seafront boulevard, the
building blends into the burly scenery of the old shipping port:
containers, piers, pipes, cranes, drills, hulls, ropes and masts.

The upper levels are drenched in a permanent

sunset thanks to two 15x60-metre orange
coloured ETFE sheets anchored to a steel frame
that create a soft, billowing intermediate facade.

Approaching the building from the paseo, it seems

deceptively petit, hiding behind its southern facade. A walk
along either side of the building reveals its actual size. The
double facade of translucent extruded polycarb panels exposes
the building's metallic structure and adds to the game of
transparencies and tonalities created by injecting tiny dabs of
neon paint into each piece, with different colours and intensities.
The landscaping plays along, with pinewood planks popping out
of their sockets from the boardwalk to create benches, and
streetlamps reminiscent of ancient diving helmets. The main
auditorium is on the opposite extreme, a concrete box covered by
coloured plastic tubes that dart out to create shading canopies
over two large outdoor terraces. Both panels and tubes are laced
with leds, and the entire building lights up from within like a

giant glow-worm at night.

Instead of worrying about defining a personal style,

the architects revisit and replay many of their
signature technical processes and aesthetic
concerns, producing unique results with each
reiteration.

The double facade of translucent extruded polycarb panels exposes the buildings metallic structure and adds to the game of transparencies and
tonalities created by injecting tiny dabs of neon paint into each piece, with different colours and intensities.

The building's floor plan is practically dissociated from

its envelope. Sinuous and playful, the main hall is designed to be
experienced as a single, continuous progression: an extension of
the seafront paseo. On the right, a suspended ramp winds its way
up to the first and second floors, hovering over an illuminated
bench that zigzags along as the building sinks below sea level.
Take the left, and the hall dips unevenly further and further
below the coastline, which is etched permanently by the light
passing through the translucent facade panels. The same panels
are painted white, backlit and switched vertically to create a

central wall that shields the conference rooms and the smaller of
the two auditoriums. You can practically slide down to the other
end of the building on the smooth, slanted, pale-green rubber
floors.

At the end of the main hall, beyond the plexiglass staircases, the entrances to the large auditorium are sheltered by ridged, spongy, reef-like concrete
walls.

At the end of the main hall, beyond the plexiglass

staircases, the entrances to the large auditorium are sheltered by
ridged, spongy, reef-like concrete walls. The upper levels are
drenched in a permanent sunset thanks to two 15x60-metre
orange-coloured ETFE sheets anchored to a steel frame that
create a soft, billowing intermediate facade. Once inside the
auditorium, visitors are completely submerged in the atmosphere
created by the underwater blues and greens of the translucent
panels. All these polychrome hues, the sways from softness to
hardness, the curvature of the walls and uneven floors are sort of
intoxicating, inducing a certain let-looseness on the part of the
visitor.

The main amphitheatre of the congress centre is also clad with a plastic texture.

Unceremonious winks are sprinkled throughout the

building: from the candy-coloured puffs in the seating lounges to
the boxy 1970s' lighting fixtures pasted on the walls, to the
bubbly round detailing of the dressing rooms and the carefree
Kubrick-esque collection of future anterior upholstered chairs in
the cafeteria, not to mention the trippy twisted neon signage and
hall-of-mirrors mazes in the bathrooms, or the oversized hanging
lamps reminiscent of inflatable beach balls. Everything comes
together in rhythmic crescendos of colour and shine. A certain
joy pervades the whole interior, in a way that remains true to the
beach origins of the sitejust like the exterior does to the butch
straightforwardness of the port.

The architects envisaged the auditorium as a place of aquatic music.

Selgascano's approach to their Cartagena project is truly

neoartisanal: they rely on locally sourced high-tech materials and
low-tech, low-impact solutions, and assume a working
philosophy of active reuse while lowering costs by investing
heavily in ingenuity. Instead of worrying about defining a
personal style, the architects revisit and replay many of their
signature technical processes and aesthetic concerns, producing
unique results with each reiteration. The design responds first
and foremost to the site's conditions and character. It is
constantly adapted on site to better suit them, through trial and
error, instead of relying on "genius" and ego, or worse, on
indecipherable calculations and solutions spewed by a machine
hundreds of miles away. And it shows.

The convention center's main amphitheater.

This is pop architecture in the truest sense: architecture

for the people. Architecture to be used, lived, enjoyed and
occupied. Not a hint of white elephant. The project's square
footage might be measured in the thousands, but there is not a
single space here that overwhelms, that doesn't feel cosy and
comfortable and user-friendly. Selgascano's conference centre
perfectly suits the swagger of Cartagena and sticks it to the sheer
brickness of Murcia. It thrives on the fundamental tension
between the vision of the promoter, who works for profit, and the
vision of the architect, who in this case, thankfully, works for the
people. This is not an architecture of conciliation (which would
be kitsch) but of soft resistance, an antidote to both the slatternly
building habits of the boom and the inevitable gloom of the bust.
Mario Ballesteros,
Critic and architectural editor

The building, which on the outside appears as a defined volume, is eroded on the inside by irregular form.

Design Architects: selgascano (Jos Selgas, Luca Cano)

Design Team: Lara Resco, Carlos Chacn, Jos de Villar, Jos
Jaraiz, Lorena del Ro, Blas Antn, Miguel San Milln, Julin
Fernandez, Beatriz Quintana, Jaehoon Yook, Jeongwoo Choi,
Laura Culiaez, Brbara Bardn
Interior Design, Architect of Record: selgascano
Assistants: Antonio Mrmol, Joaqun Crceles, Rul Jimnez
Site area: 5.628 mq
Total built area: 18.500 mq
Design phase: 2002
Construction: 200611/2011
Cost: 34.5 million
Structural Engineering: FHECOR
Mechanical/Electrical/Plumbing Engineering: JG
Acoustic Engineering: ARAU ACUSTICA
Textile Engineering: LASTRA Y ZORRILLA
General Contractors: DRAGADOS, INTERSA
Plastic Manufacturers: POLIMERTECNIC, SABIC
Auditorium Seating: FIGUERAS
Floor Manufacturer: PRIALPAS
Lighting Manufacturers: IDEALUX, TALLERES ZAMORA
Wall Manufacturer: ATA AISLAMIENTOS TECNICOS
AGROALIMENTARIOS

A broken line cuts out the aperture of the reception desk in the translucent lateral front. In the foreground is the metal frame of the facades, windbraced and clad with retro-illuminated plastic pipes.

The outside patio.

Transverse section.

Author

Sections

Mario Ballesteros

Architecture

Photography

Keywords

Iwan Baan

DOMUS 954, Jos Selgas, Luca Cano,

selgascano
Location
Cartagena

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